31 Days of Horror: Day 22 ‘Don’t Let Him In’ (2011)
Directed by: Kelly Smith

By
Ronny Sharpes
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Synopsis: Two couples spending a weekend in the country cross paths with a brutal serial killer. As the body count rises, suspicion turns into paranoia.

Typical young couple Paige (Sophie Linfield) and Calvin (Rhys Meredith) are headed on holiday to a remote home in the woods. Along the way they pick up Calvin’s hussy of a younger sister and Tristan, the arrogant businessman she’s picked up the night before in a pub. When they arrive, the local constable informs them that a serial killer nicknamed “The Tree Surgeon” is running amok in the area. Tristan disappears for a few hours under the pretext of gathering supplies at the local store and while he’s away an injured man arrives at the door. Paige treats his injuries and the mysterious stranger begins to settle in. Without giving too much away, it comes down to Paige having to figure out which of the two newcomers are responsible for the deaths that have arrived at their door.

I had never heard of this one prior to it being shoved down my throat on the horror movie side of TikTok. It was being touted as one of the scariest movies streaming and great British horror so I figured, what better time than now to see what it’s all about. That was a mistake. Oh well, that’s the gamble you take when you’re going back and watching the movies you missed. If this is what the Brits have to offer for horror then I’m fine without it. The entire plot was so predictable that I called the third act 10 minutes into the flick when the “killer” character stepped on to the screen. The dialogue was terrible and not in that fun “B” movie kind of way. The whole film just felt like a made for tv production littered with poor writing.

The film opens with what looked like a promising premise. It was attention grabbing and had me invested. That was until it got to the jittery slow motion action shots reminiscent of the things I used to shoot on DV tape back in the day. I will say that the opening and closing scenes (which are actually interconnected) were worth the watch but everything in between was completely unnecessary. Luckily it’s only an 80 minute runtime so not much is lost.

.5 out of 5 (If I could go lower, I would)

Join me again tomorrow and let’s see if we can find some gems among the garbage as we continue this strange little journey down the horror rabbit hole.

Middleburg Review: ‘The Killer’
David Fincher's Hitman Thriller With Michael Fassbender Takes Aim And Misses The Mark

By
Travis Hopson
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It’s not always true that a great filmmaker can then make any movie he works on great. David Fincher is one of the best directors alive and has done pretty much everything there is to do. He’s coming off the one true curveball of his career, 2020’s nostalgic biopic Mank, and seems eager to get back to grittier stuff. That would be The Killer, an adaptation of Alexis Nolent’s graphic novel about a hitman and a job that goes awry. You’ve seen this plot a million times, and personally, as most readers of this site know, this is right in my wheelhouse. To have Fincher adding his stylish hand to this genre was incredibly exciting and with powerhouse actor Michael Fassbender in the lead? How could it not work?

Well, The Killer doesn’t work. It turns out that great filmmakers sometimes can’t elevate ho-hum material, and can sometimes even hinder it. If this were a movie directed by Luc Besson or one of his proteges like Pierre Morel or Olivier Megaton, it would’ve had the propulsive energy it so desperately needed. But Fincher dials it back to half-speed to focus on every minute, nihilistic detail in a desperate search for meaning. The film lumbers along and, while some of Fassbender’s unnamed assassin’s cynical musings are interesting on their own, they don’t amount to a lot when all is said and done.

What’s particularly frustrating is that the opening sequence, in which we watch the Killer’s neurotic attention to detail, is pretty damn cool. The best thing about hitman movies is getting absorbed into their world and their individual process, learning their moral code or lack thereof, etc. “Empathy is weakness. I serve no god or country,”, is the mantra of the day. We see the Killer waiting out the boredom of a long-delayed mission in an abandoned WeWork office in Paris. Why? Because you can’t trust AirBnBs anymore. Too many nanny cams! We see him doing yoga, sleeping upright, and bemoaning the lack of sleep that comes with waking himself up every hour to see if the target has finally arrived. He ventures down to the street, notes the number of McDonalds’ franchises in Paris, then orders an Egg McMuffin but removes the McMuffin. No carbs for this dude. Everything is meticulously done.

Fans of this genre already know what’s going to happen, and that it takes an excruciating amount of time to get there is just a precursor to the rest of the film which makes two hours feel like four. The target arrives, the Killer sets up a sniper shot that should be easy for a guy like him. But it misses and hits a civilian, leaving the Killer to scramble to clean up the mess. While he tries to explain it away, the botched job leads to his partner being assaulted to within an inch of her life. Now the Killer must exact revenge on everyone involved in her attack, and make sure they pay the ultimate price.

Yeah, that’s it. The bones of this story are something I quite respect. A simple revenge plot can be one of the most satisfying stories to tell because everyone can understand it and get behind it. Even in this case, where the Killer is amoral and has no qualms about murdering good people if that’s what the job calls for. We’re not asked to judge him at all, just to go along on his quest for vengeance. Fincher’s fingerprints are all over the place, from the use of shadows to the heavy employ of The Smiths to back the sounds of gunfire and physical damage. His obsession with capitalism and its impact on society is teased, tongue-in-cheek, by the abundance of product placement. There is an incredible hand-to-hand fight between the Killer and a massive assailant that reminds of the close-quarters brutality of Haywire, that most underrated Steven Soderbergh thriller led by a rookie Gina Carano. Short of that, though, The Killer doesn’t offer much beyond the familiar turns of an oft-told story. Even when Tilda Swinton arrives she doesn’t add anything in terms of a stand-out role or a quirky turn of phrase. She’s just another pit stop, and it serves to remind you that this movie could’ve been so much more than what it is.

The combo of Fincher, Fassbender, and a revenge arc is too good for The Killer to be an outright terrible movie. It’s definitely not. But when it’s over you can’t escape the feeling that it had the potential to be amazing, and instead, it just misses the target.

The Killer opens in select theaters on October 27th before Netflix streaming on November 10th.

Middleburg Review: ‘Saltburn’
Emerald Fennell's Stylish, Kinky Aristocratic Thriller Ensares You In Its Web

By
Travis Hopson
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If Cruel Intentions and Brideshead Revisited were burned to ashes then laced with acid and smoked, you’d get the sensation of Emerald Fennell’s Promising Young Woman follow-up, Saltburn. A constantly-shocking look at the sickeningly wealthy and privileged, it’s a film that never fails to titillate with its posh presentation and characters fueled by “fuck you” money and uncontrollable desires. It’s a sophomore effort with all of the brazenness and awareness of Fennell’s debut feature, only turned toward a psychosexual revenge thriller with a venomous edge.

At some point, families are going to learn not to invite Barry Keoghan into their homes. It never turns out well. He plays Oliver Quick, a name that sounds like it was taken from a Dickens novel, a bright, shy intellectual scholarship kid newly enrolled at Oxford where the entrenched rich kids laugh and mock him. Struggling to make friends in this environment, he lucks into a chance encounter with the dreamy, delicious Felix Catton (Jacob Elordi, also seen as Elvis in Priscilla), the desire of every guy and gal on campus. When troubles at home send Oliver into an emotional tailspin, Felix, who has quickly become his best and only friend, invites him to his family’s palatial digs at Saltburn, a literal castle of British grandeur and stature.

Oliver has wormed his way into this eccentric clan with the slippery ease of Tom Ripley. Rosamund Pike is a gas as Elsbeth, Felix’s oblivious, ditzy ex-model mother whose stone-faced line delivery offers the best gags. Richard E. Grant is just as dopey as family patriarch Sir James, suit of armor and all. Felix’s emotionally-broken sister Venetia (Alison Oliver) is apparently the eye of all of her brother’s annual visitors. And then there’s Felix’s best buddy and leech, Farleigh (Archie Madekwe), who recognizes in Oliver a fellow moocher with an ulterior motive. Even in a massive castle like Saltburn there can’t be room for them both. Carey Mulligan has a fun cameo as Elsbeth’s attention-seeking friend, Pamela, a sadsack dressed in rainbow colors who has overstayed her welcome.

Using shadows, sharp corners, and an impressive amount of reflective surfaces, Fennell presents Saltburn as a place trapped in its own warped, perverse version of reality. While set in 2006 (we see them watching Superbad at one point), time and place seem lost in a place such as this. We expect extreme hedonistic tendencies but, despite lavish parties and no shortage of sexual escapes, the Catton home is silly but fairly reserved. It’s Oliver’s transgressive actions that push Saltburn over the edge and will test the viewer’s mettle. At times malevolent and charming, Keoghan’s performance is all-encompassing, demanding that he slurp up every drop like Oliver lapping up Felix’s dirty bathwater. It’s not the kind of role you can be non-committal to. Just as Fennell can’t risk going halfway with the full Gothic tone of the film, and yes, that is undoubtedly going to rub some people the wrong way. But the excesses are few and deliberate, revealing details about the perpetrator that help push Saltburn to a wild, unexpected conclusion.

While at times overcooked and full of itself, Saltburn is an extremely entertaining, disturbing, and weird look at the desires of both the rich and the wanting. Fennell has a need to overexplain the conclusion Paul Haggis-style, retreating to clarify past actions when an air of ambiguity is more in keeping with the film’s murky aura. But that isn’t enough to dump a bucket of cold water on the experience. Fennell luxuriates in overabundance and kink, the expert use of score and visual dexterity to set an evocative mood that gives way to lasting dread. Saltburn is imperfect, but like the titular estate it snags you in its grip and doesn’t let go, not that you’d ever want to leave in the first place.

Saltburn opens in theaters on November 24th.

Middleburg Review: ‘The Holdovers’
Alexander Payne And Paul Giamatti Bring Grumpy Charm To The Holidays

By
Travis Hopson
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The 1970s aesthetic deployed by Alexander Payne in his charming new dramedy, The Holdovers, isn’t a mere gimmick. From the technicolor palette to the pops of vintage film stock to the fading transitions, the film more than looks the part. But it’s the sweet-natured, simple storytelling and melodramatic character arcs that evoke the period more than anything else. Payne’s latest couldn’t be more different than his unnecessarily bloated sci-fi comedy Downsizing, and fans of the filmmaker will be pleased with this welcome return to form.

It’s also a treat to see Payne reunited with Paul Giamatti, the actor whose grumpy wine connosuier in Sideways catapulted both of their careers. In The Holdovers he plays Paul Hunham, a history professor at Barton Academy, one disliked by the staff and the students mostly due to his arrogance and unwillingness to cater to rich kids and elitist colleagues. When not insulting everyone in sight, in ways many of them aren’t smart enough to notice, Paul can be found drowning his sorrows in Jim Beam. Once again, Giamatti is a grumpy drunk who drinks straight from the bottle.

Paul does have one supporter on campus; grieving cafeteria worker Mary (Da’Vine Joy Randolph), whose son recently died in Vietnam and she’s facing Christmas for the first time with him gone. Then there’s Angus (talented newcomer Dominic Sessa), a lanky, mop-haired smartass who has been abandoned over the holidays by his mother and her new husband while they take a long-delayed honeymoon. With Paul forced to supervise students left behind over Christmas, Mary, and Angus begin to bond in unexpected, meaningful ways.

It would be so easy for this film to lean hard into broad comedic strokes and conflict; setting up a common enemy for the trio to rail against. But there really isn’t any of that here. The villains in this case are loneliness, abandonment, and feelings of being underestimated. Watching the subtle ways these characters begin to move past their grief by connecting through humor, you’d be surprised to learn that Payne didn’t write the script himself, with that honor going to screenwriter David Hemingson.

And while The Holdovers does get off to a slow start, the journey is worthwhile, fulfilling, and quite funny. With both men at opposite ends of the hormonal spectrum, conversations about sex go to some unexpectedly hilarious directions, made funnier by Paul’s one extremely lazy eye and fishy odor. Giamatti and Sessa spend the bulk of the film sharing screen time, trading quips and revealing vulnerable shades to their characters. This is a breakout, charismatic debut for Sessa, one in which he isn’t overshadowed by his more-experienced co-stars. Speaking of which, it’s another great supporting role for Randolph, revealing more about her character with a single line than most can with an entire monologue. She’s been doing this steadily since 2019’s Dolemite Is My Name and hopefully she’ll start getting recognized for it.

The Holdovers is actually something of a gamble. Making a downbeat holiday film that’s sorta sad in a style that doesn’t exactly scream “high-energy” is likely to be a tough sell this Christmas. But there are sweet rewards for those willing to invest, and those who do may find The Holdovers to be one of those movies they make an annual tradition.

Focus Features will release The Holdovers in select theaters on October 27th, with a wider expansion on November 10th.

31 Days of Horror: Day 21 ‘Doom Asylum’ (1987)
Directed by: Richard Friedman

By
Ronny Sharpes
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Synopsis: A horribly disfigured lawyer, wrongfully pronounced dead after a terrible car accident is taken to an asylum for dissection only to come back alive, kill everyone and make the asylum his killing playground.

Mitch (Michael Rogen) rises from an autopsy table after a horrible car accident leaves him disfigured and his girlfriend dead. 10 years later after taking up residence in an abandoned asylum, he preys on unsuspecting teens and a 3 piece, all girl punk band that happen to cross his path. Little do we know but Kiki, one of the youngsters, is actually the child of Mitch’s deceased girlfriend.

This is another one of those low budget, pure trash (said lovingly) 80’s slashers that lays on the parody thick. There’s a small subset of folks that really appreciate this type of schlock and I’m one of those people. These are the types of films I really love. Everything from the over-the-top gore effects to the absurd kill methods is pure gold. Yes, the comedy is cheesy but that’s the intent. When put all together, this is textbook “B” movie slasher material.

There are little things Friedman does that just add to the character of the movie itself (and bump my rating up a little). For example, the flick opens up in 4:3 ratio and looks like it was completely shot on a handheld beta-max. Then at the 6:53 mark it shifts to widescreen and looks a little upscaled, conveying that 10 years have passed. Then again, that could have just been that the cut I watched was altered later but I would like to give the director the benefit of the doubt and the credit.

Doom Asylum clocks in at 77 minutes with a good portion of that being taken up by clips from The Crimes of Stephen Hawke spliced in and still accomplishes what some movies today can’t. With a $90,000 budget and a cast that includes Kristen Davis of Sex and the City fame in her first ever role, Friedman created a parody of 80’s slashers filled with dark humor and enough gore to satiate any genre fan and it only took him 8 days.

If you want to check this one out then head on over to Tubi. It was streaming there as of this writing.

Join me again tomorrow as we continue this strange little journey down the horror rabbit hole.

Middleburg Review: ‘American Fiction’
Jeffrey Wright Leaves Them Bamboozled In Funny, Insightful Satire About Plight Of The Black Writer

By
Travis Hopson
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In 1985, Robert Townsend offered one of the most insightful, and funniest looks at the relationship between art and Black culture with Hollywood Shuffle. The film followed a Black actor who struggled with staying true to himself, or “selling out” and pandering to a White audience that craved stories full of Black stereotypes. Writer/director Cord Jefferson’s equally brilliant and pointed American Fiction is like a spiritual cousin exploring the literary landscape, where many of the themes that Townsend addressed 40 years ago are sadly still relevant.

Jeffrey Wright, one of the best actors working today, paints a complex, hilarious portrait of delusion as Thelonius “Monk” Ellison. An accomplished author who has been struggling to get his next, highly-intellectual novel published as viral authors such as Sintara Golden (Issa Rae) make waves with stories of Black trauma and pain in the inner-city that make White people feel comfortable and critics call “important.” Fed up by it all, Monk turns the tables by writing a pandering piece of trash full of every cliche about African-Americans he can find, which he comes up with by watching a bunch of Black movies from the ’90s, an era in which these stories were definitely prevalent. Of course, Monk’s book becomes a smash hit, and while he’s hidden under a pseudonym (the ridiculously thuggish Stagg R. Lee), he still wants to find a way to get out of this mess he created.

This would be extremely silly if Monk wasn’t such a complicated, fascinating jumble of contradictions and biases. There’s clearly a lot of self-loating eating away at him, in particular regarding his upper middle-class upbringing and taste for the finer things. It’s as if he resents the idea of being judged for his blackness, so he steers clear of anything that could remotely be defined as “Black”. He doesn’t even like it when one of his books is placed in the African-American Studies section of the library. This is the same guy whose angry defense of teaching Flannery O’Connor’s *The Artificial Ni**er* drove an offended white student out of the classroom in tears. Mostly, he resents authors such as Golden who, in his mind, diminish Black potential so they can make money making entertainment to comfort the white gatekeepers.

So does that make Monk a sell out for doing exactly the same thing? His scheme is netting big money, which he uses to pay for medical treatment for his ailing mom (the always-great Leslie Uggams) and to help keep the struggling family afloat. Jefferson, adapting Percival Everett’s novel Erasure, smartly ensures that his film isn’t limited by the comedic satirization. In fact, what’s great about American Fiction is that it isn’t so easily defined. It’s part family dramedy, part literary and Hollywood satire, and part character study. Monk’s family life is just as critical to this story and helps lend dramatic heft. The Ellison clan are all brilliant, a total family of doctors in different fields. Tracee Ellis Ross, Sterling K. Brown, and Uggams make for incredible elements of this ensemble, while it’s also great to see Erika Alexander in a love interest role as a neighbor who Monk falls for. The problem is Monk is also extremely closed off from his emotions and fails to connect with just about everybody. He’s not quite on the American Splendor Harvey Pekar scale, but Monk is a bit of a curmudgeon.

Jefferson nearly lets things spin out of control with the introduction of Adam Brody as a hot-shot Hollywood producer who wants to turn the Stagg R. book into a movie. As he confirms all of the industry ignorance the film has been commenting on, he also nearly throws the film out-of-balance comedically. But it’s hard to complain when you’re laughing so hard. The only time the film does get away from Jefferson is in the closing moments, a branching set of paths that are too cute by half. American Fiction is nonetheless an impressive feature debut for Jefferson, offering sharp wit, and a heartfelt, at times heartbreaking look at Black intellectuals living their lives outside of how the world perceives them.

Middleburg Review: ‘Dream Scenario’
Nicolas Cage Is On Everyone's Minds In A Strange, Nightmare Dark Comedy

By
Travis Hopson
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The funny thing about Nicolas Cage is that at this stage of his career, after many strange, off-the-wall performances in bizarre movies, he’s kinda ubiquitous in a way. We see him everywhere, in movies, commercials, viral memes. And that makes him just the right guy for a movie like Dream Scenario, in which his regular joe Paul Matthews suddenly begins appearing in everyone’s dreams. Kristoffer Borgli’s third feature explores our obsession with celebrity, especially in the social media age, and how that fame impacts someone who is, by all accounts, pretty ordinary and invisible.

Borgli has a lot of fun with this idea, and so does Cage. Paul is a fascinatingly weird and deeply-flawed guy, and fame only makes it worse. A guy who is obsessed with looking weak, especially in front of his wife Janet (Julianne Nicholson) and two daughters, and definitely feels short-changed by his academic career, Paul sees this newfound celebrity as an avenue to greater success. And for a while, it works. Paul is thrust into the limelight by appearing in the dreams of millions. He doesn’t actually do anything in these dreams; he’s a passive observer. That passivity matches his personality to a tee. For all of his protestations, Paul eats up the attention. In class he basically holds court, listening to stories about his exploits in the heads of others. He does TV news, and explores offers to expand into branding during a strange meeting with an upstart company led by a douchey Michael Cera.

The upward swing is too brief, however. Borgli gives up on the fun quirkiness of the conceit early, allowing a much darker observation to occur. Before long, Paul is experiencing an ugly, nightmarish side of celebrity. Those fans who were begging for selfies earlier, are now terrified of him. Some even want to hurt him.

Dream Scenario looks at the consequences of Paul’s embrace of fame, not just for him but for his family. They are innocent victims in all of this, too, and we’re left to ponder how accountable Paul should be for that. He becomes an overnight sensation for doing absolutely nothing, not unlike your average everyday Youtube star. And like a lot of them, the fame goes to his head.

Borgli meshes high-concept comedy and sci-fi with dashes of oft-scary horror, and the mix isn’t always perfect. But in Cage you have an actor who walks in all of those worlds quite well, and the further he ventures into weird and wild territory, the better. Alongside him is the always-reliable Nicholson as his poor wife, standing fast by her guy even as it throws her life and career into upheaval. This strange phenomena changes everyone, so much so that it’s unclear how the film is going to end. Borgli seems to be struggling with it, too, making for a final act that takes an unfortunate narrative leap that might’ve made more sense if things were better explained. It feels like a shortcut to get to the conclusion that Borgli wants, rather than one that makes sense. Dream Scenario is a special kind of offbeat experience the likes of which wouldn’t be possible with anyone other than Nicolas Cage, and we’re lucky to have him.

A24 will release Dream Scenario into theaters on November 10th.

Despair Is in the Air in the Trailer for Netflix’s ‘Society of the Snow’

John Nolan

October 21, 2023

For all the gripes about oversaturation of media these days, it does have it’s bright spots. You can almost guarantee, at some point, every major story will have been made into a film. Society of the Snow, an upcoming Netflix film about the 1972 Uruguayan Air Force flight 571 crash into the Andes, is a film that I’m surprised took streaming to produce.

This story was almost an urban legend when I was a kid. Admittedly I usually mixed this and the completely different Dytalov Pass incident up, but everyone knew the story about the plane that crashed in the mountains leading the survivors to eat their friends. Obviously, Netflix will introduce much more nuance into the story then my elementary school did, but the point remains…its a story that horrified and fascinated people.

The trailer, posted below, looks to be a single survivor narrative taking us through the absolute horror of going from safety in society to complete and total isolation. There’s an almost dreamlike quality to the trailer which, if cut properly with the introduced threats, could paint an eerie picture. Once scene in particular, when the survivors hear an unidentified sound only to realize it’s an avalanche shows that this movie is going to try and make us feel what it’s like to go from total despair to something much deeper.

Official Synopsis:
On October 13 1972, Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 crashed in the Andes. Only 29 of the 45 passengers survived the crash. Based on this remarkable true story, J.A. Bayona’s ‘Society of the snow’ will close the Venice Film Festival, participate in the Perlas section of the San Sebastian Film Festival and will arrive on Netflix soon.

Middleburg Review: ‘The Zone Of Interest’
Jonathan Glazer Returns With A Chilling But Hollow Holocaust Family Drama

By
Travis Hopson
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Has there ever been a Holocaust movie where a character makes an impassioned plea to stay in Auschwitz, rather than to escape such a nightmarish Hell? That is the perverse humor in Jonathan Glazer’s first film in a decade, The Zone of Interest. And it’s that twisted perspective capturing the banality, the ho-hum everyday nature of horrors committed by the Nazis, that Glazer is determined to emphasize without having much else to say. Once that sick joke has worn out its welcome, which it does fairly early, there’s nowhere else to go.

Based loosely on the 2014 Martin Amis novel of the same name, the film follows Hedwig Höss (Sandra Hüller), the wife of Nazi commandant Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel), who lives in an idyllic Nazi Dreamhouse just beyond the walls of Auschwitz. She has built a comfortable little Aryan paradise, with lush gardens she takes quite a lot of pride in, a swimming pool, and plenty of space for their little pure-blood children to grow strong. If it wasn’t for the constant drone of horror ringing in the background, a sound you as a viewer will disturbingly learn to block out as well, you’d never know that a genocide was taking place mere feet away.

But that’s the point that Glazer makes fairly early on and keeps repeating throughout. We see Hedwig and Rudolf go through the everyday rigamarole of married life. She orders the servants around, makes casual comments to her friends about the expensive trinkets they’ve claimed from exterminated Jews, and begs her husband for a return trip to Italy. Meanwhile, Rudolf is stuck in the Nazi version of The Office, having meetings about a new crematorium to be built, admonishing the idiot junior Nazis about plucking flowers haphazardly, and ultimately fighting a move to be transferred elsewhere.

Glazer parallels this with an odd sequence involving a Polish girl stealing food to be taken back to her family. Captured in monochrome and not too dissimilar to Scarlett Johansson’s devouring of Scottish men in Glazer’s Under the Skin, we expect that this is where we will eventually see the shocking violence we have been kept at a distance from. Instead, Glazer offers a weak comparison to Hansel and Gretel, read to the children at bedtime. To be fair, Glazer doesn’t usually flesh out his characters very deeply, allowing for imagery to do the work for him. And in that regard, The Zone of Interest is bleak, chilling, and unrelenting, especially when matched with Mica Levi’s disconcerting score.

The point Glazer reaches for and hits in the first five minutes is that life for the Nazis responsible for the Holocaust was pretty damn awesome, indeed. They had everything and what they didn’t have, they simply took. As Hedwig pleads to Rudolf at the nearby lake they use to paddleboat frequently, this is the life they had been dreaming of since they were 17 years old. And now they have it, living the kind of simple life that Hitler demands of his people. Hedwig appears to be a normal, everyday wife and mother caring for her family, but we see her casual cruelty when stirred to anger. She threatens one innocent maid that she’ll have her husband spread the poor girl’s ashes if she makes another mistake.

Glazer makes his point so early that we expect for there to be some new angle, some fresh perspective. While there’s a bizarre contemporary coda as a last ditch effort, nothing meaningful comes out of The Zone of Interest, leaving us with the sinking realization that this hollow feeling is all Glazer had intended from the beginning.

The Zone of Interest opens in theaters on December 15th courtesy of A24.

Middleburg Review: ‘Priscilla’
Sofia Coppola's Sleek Yet Grounded Take On Priscilla Presley's Life Doesn't Sing The Way It Should

By
Cortland Jacoby
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Sofia Coppola has made a career out of cinematically capturing young women on the precipice of adulthood. We saw it in The Virgin Suicides, Maria Antionette, The Beguiled, and we see it in the opening sequence of her latest film Priscilla. Based on Priscilla Prestley’s memoir, Elvis and Me, the esteemed filmmaker attempts to put a sidelined and pedestaled American icon at the center of her own story, in a way other depictions of her have not.

We first meet Priscilla as a high school freshman, stationed with her family in Germany in the late 1950s. The first time we see her whole face, she’s sitting at a soda counter, sipping on a float and working on school work – a subtle reminder of how young she is. In that same scene, she is propositioned by a military official to attend a party where Elvis is meant to make an appearance. A tale as old as time, they meet, have a five-year courtship, and consummate their relationship on their wedding night, all the while the cracks in their relationship start to show.

If last year’s Elvis was all spectacle, Priscilla is grounded in an edited reality. Because Ms. Prestley was heavily involved in the film’s production, we can feel her hand guiding the story along at times, especially in the film’s final 15 heavily sanitized minutes. Her journey from kept daughter to Elvis’ pet wife to independent woman is not a clean one and her character lacks the agency you’d expect from a liberation story.

Sofia Coppola knows how to visualize young womanhood and she has a brutal job hammering home Priscilla’s lack of agency and surplus of youth. With a muted color palette and a soundtrack composed mainly of ‘50s, ‘60s, and ‘70s female artists, Coppola inserts her signature style into every frame. Jacob Elordi throws in infantilizing terms of endearment whenever he can, subtly controlling her with the drop of a suggestion. His performance never overshadows Cailee Spaeney but rather shows the overlooked side of Elvis’ private life.

While Elvis overlooked the Presleys’ marital woes, Priscilla forces you to grapple with them. Coppola factors in the idea that Priscilla could have been groomed, that their relationship was at least toxic, if not abusive. Spaeney’s performance, especially during scenes of turmoil, is quietly captivating, wrestling with her circumstances under a heavy lid of false eyelashes.

The film ends how you expect it to, with its leading lady driving away. Surprisingly, Dolly Parton’s “I Will Always Love You” is playing in the background. Fans of the Country icon will know that Elvis actually wanted the song but demanded Parton hand over the rights. It’s a cinematic moment that hits harder when you know some of the backstory and nuance. That seems to be a theme with Priscilla. Though Coppola’s muted style grounds the film, the more you know the more effective the film is.

Priscilla hits theaters Oct. 27. Watch the trailer below.

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